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Shortly after they recorded "We Love You," daughter Diane jumped out a window and died, so she wasn't around to pick up the spoken-word Grammy they won for it. Art always maintained that Diane was on LSD when she defenestrated, and he became a big crusader against drugs, although the autopsy found no LSD in her body. But you can thank him and his campaign for the countless bad TV shows in which someone drops acid and then jumps. (What was even more awesome was all the bad TV shows where someone does, like, angel dust and then jumps out a window. Aren't you more likely to sit in the corner pulling out your own teeth with pliers on that stuff?)
A Grammy. And just think, 57 years from now he'll be getting the Pulitzer, a la Hank Williams.

Recently, I was poking around for info on Bobby Jameson/Chris Lucey, who put out the enigmatic Songs of Protest and Anti-Protest in '65. Turns out Jameson was pals with Diane Linkletter right up until the time of her death. The liner notes to Rev-Ola's reissue of "Songs of Protest..." (released, apparently, without Jameson's permission) repeated the falsehood that Jameson had supplied Linkletter with the LSD that killed her. Read all about this controvery here.

After Diane Linkletter's death, when the LSD story was taken as gospel, Harlan Ellison wrote a memorable column for the Los Angeles Free Press excoriating Art for foisting a dishonest view of middle-class American life. The column is in his collection THE GLASS TEAT.

Harlan Ellison wrote the same dumb things about LSD as most of the other media people who wrote about them at the time, and more than one (lame) story of the "Go Ask Alice" variety (i.e. person tries acid and disappears into irreversible psychosis....judging from the prevalence of this even in fiction of the time, you would think this were the norm). Ellison claimed that jazz musicians who used drugs "blew pure lunacy" - and man, would that this were consistently true!